From later piecing together the action, it was clear that Farmer, flying right seat instead of the customary left, saw rifle flashes winking at him from his side of the helicopter and tracers coming like bright jet-propelled basketballs. Instinctively, without realizing it, he pushed his bird over to the left away from the fire as he landed. The clearing wasn’t big enough for evasive maneuvers.
Scrubby trees surrounded the opening. In the dark, the tip of his blade whacked one of the trees, knocking about eight inches off the rotor’s tip. There was a sudden blade stall that vibrated the aircraft so violently that it shook loose rivets and rattled teeth. The engine quit momentarily, dropping the Huey about ten feet to the ground. Farmer and Miles both thought they were in for good. Farmer was already on the radio yelling, “Mayday! Mayday!”
He couldn’t stay out of the trees. They were like a magnet to him.
The engine caught again immediately; the loss of part of the rotor blade made it run as rough as an old Alabama Ford truck chugging along with only six of its eight cylinders firing. Not realizing what had happened, the three remaining LRRPs piled aboard while Farmer’s gunner hammered at the treeline with his machine gun.
By all rights, the aircraft should never have flown out of the clearing. But such was the flow of adrenaline in all the excitement that Farmer Farmer experienced one of his moments of brilliance, or perhaps desperation, and pulled pitch. Slowly, nursing the wounded bird, he lifted it off the ground. Miles later remarked how calm the Farmer was, like he was sitting in his rocking chair on his front porch, in spite of the radio’s going ape shit, his machine guns pounding, tracers streaking past or tickling as they pierced the bird’s skin, and Cobras racetracking off his flank shooting their rockets and miniguns. Fortunately for Farmer, perhaps, he didn’t have to think; all he had to do was fall back on training and instinct.
From aloft, I watched him bring the Huey up wobbling like a duck with a wounded wing. He had his red-and-green running lights on to let the Cobras know where he was. They also illuminated him for the enemy. I expected him to go down in a ball of flames at any instant. Stockton still sat frozen in his seat, staring in horror.
By some extreme stretching of luck and fate, the slick limped away through all that ordnance out to get it. Unable to climb, it flopped slowly along at treetop level until it cleared the kill zone. Farmer’s voice over the radio was strained and thin but also controlled. I asked him if he wanted to set down somewhere. I had already notified TOC of the situation and more slicks and Cobras were being scrambled. Farmer informed me they were going to try to ride the crippled bird back to Tay Ninh.
“It’s awful dark down there, Mini-Man,” he said. “I’m afraid of boogers.”
His thinking was that if he stayed low and they had to go into the trees, they had a chance of surviving the crash. I couldn’t understand how the chopper stayed aloft. It wobbled, pitched, and jerked as though on the strings of a mad and drunken puppeteer. It was a tribute to Farmer’s often-undemonstrated skills that he kept it limping forward. I was amazed.
“Mini-Man, are you still up there?” he kept asking.
“Don’t worry, Farm Boy. I got you covered.”
I followed him in case he went down, hovering overhead at about one thousand feet altitude. It was a long flight. A long, long flight filled with tension, uncertainty, and the expectation that the bird had to crash at any moment. I could imagine the anxiety inside Farmer’s aircraft.
Full darkness came quickly as it did in the tropics. The lights of Tay Ninh sparkled on the horizon. Taylor and Mississippi joined the cavalcade, along with Swede in his Cobra. Two Snakes from Blue Max kept going to join the action at the rejected LZ.
“We’re going to make it, Mini-Man!”
Watching him continue to flounder his way home was a little grisly. Like watching a dog injured on the expressway dragging his hindquarters while attempting to avoid onrushing eighteen-wheelers. The question was not whether the dog got hit, but when.
He made it across the river, then above the outer perimeter wire. Tower cleared the runway for his emergency landing. Farmer plopped down his chopper with its final gasp. Grateful LRRPs forced wooden nickels into everybody’s hands. Stockton got out, a little unsteady on his feet, and looked for bullet holes. He found none. He stood looking at me.
AMOC’s inspection of Farmer’s helicopter revealed a warped frame, while centrifugal force had twisted what remained of the blades.
“That helicopter couldn’t fly,” Captain Stiner said.
But it did.